Hereditary (2018) is a successful horror film -- the picture establishes an unpleasant atmosphere and, then, exploits audience fear by having its principal characters act irrationally to put themselves in positions of maximum peril. In Hereditary, there is an attic swarming with flies, a lightless enclosed space in which a rotting, headless body is stored. Of course, the characters spend substantial amounts of time in the attic -- when something is scary downstairs, which is much of the time, where do they flee? To the attic, of course. Ordinarily, this doesn't make much sense and has to be accepted, tongue-in-cheek as it were, as a horror film convention. (For instance, in Jon Kraszinski's A Quiet Place, the characters are always going off alone to throw himself in harm's way -- none of this makes any narrative sense, particularly since Kraszinski's monster movie, posits the hero as a caring, effective, and fearless father. But, if this is the case, why does he blithely put his children in peril time and time again?) Hereditary's innovation is to make the convention of characters deliberately, if inadvisably, going into dark and scary coverts intentional -- ultimately, the people in Hereditary want to be dismembered or horribly mutilated: they seek refuge in places that maximally are awful because it is their intention to self-harm. This makes Hereditary's images of suffering more unpleasant because the people are inflecting pain on themselves -- this is their fate as members of a coven of devil-worshiping witches. Although Hereditary is not too sophisticated -- it lacks any sort of wit, eschews any self-mockery, and is grimly, if efficiently, nasty -- it is still fairly intelligent as a horror film: it's more similar to stylish and fairly literate pictures like Rosemary's Baby (Polanski 1968) and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), movies that posit groups of devil worshipers passing for normal folks in milieu that are recognizably ordinary.
Everything tilts toward the radically abnormal in Hereditary: spectral voices summon devil-worshiping supplicants from school cafeterias and playgrounds. The house of horrors at the film's center has an interior that is completely, and theatrically, unrelated to its outside. The house's exterior is a typical McMansion, all gables and big windows set in a gorgeous forest beneath equally gorgeous mountains. The inside of the house is like one of Edward Kienholz' more hideous environments: it's all narrow corridors with ancient tightly shut doors, dark rooms with fireplaces guttering with sensitive flame, dismal, cell-like enclosures that all lightless -- in the attic, where the demons congregate, we actually see that the ceiling has been ripped open allowing jagged shards of light to penetrate the darkness. This is surreally opposed to the way the house looks on the outside. And, in fact, one motif in the film is that there are spaces within spaces, just as family histories contain horrors concealed within other horrors. The mother in the super-dysfunctional family living in the house-of-horrors is like a figure in a Tarkovsky film -- she makes little models of the house and stashes miniature figures, including demons, inside the tiny rooms that she builds. (She also can levitate like people in Tarkovsky's movies.) The concept is that there are secrets within secrets, although all will be revealed in the film's final grandiose sequence. This ending is the most exotic and spectacular aspect of the film -- after all the dimly lit Gran Guignol self-immolations and -beheadings at the movies frenzied climax, the picture ends with the coven of devil worshipers paying tribute to the chief demon, one of the Eight Lords of Hell, named "Paynim". Ominous music is central to horror films -- generally, a horror movies is simply risible without the spooky musical cues. Here, Paynim's followers gather in a sort of "treehouse of terror" -- I hope the reference to The Simpson's famous Halloween shows is intentional. On the soundtrack, we hear arpeggios that are clearly derived from the monumental music at the outset of Wagner's Rheingold -- this is the surging, churning "Rhine motif", complete with booming bass and endlessly sustained bass note (Wagner's famous E-flat note from which the whole world is fashioned). In the "treehouse of terror", Lord Paynim is crowned while supplicant devil worshipers kneel in obeisance, several of them, in a wonderfully disturbing tableaux, decomposing and headless bodies. The head of one of the carcasses has been mounted in a wooden idol to which the corpses are bowing. It's a completely psychotic and spectacular sequence, roaring with Wagnerian bombast, the music rising to a barbaric crescendo before the closing credits, weirdly enough Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." The best horror film's are often ultimately silly and inconsequential -- despite the rave reviews, I don't think Hereditary is one of the greatest of such films, although it aspires to greatness in its otherworldly and barbarous last five minutes. And, therefore, if you can tolerate pictures of this sort, worth seeing.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Barking Dogs Never Bite
Korean director Boon Jong-Ho directed this film, Barking Dogs don't Bite, his first feature, in 2000. The movie is an elaborate "shaggy dog story" -- both literally and generically. A "shaggy dog story" is an intricate narration that can be expanded with as many complications as desired but which remains ultimately (and intentionally) inconsequential. Typically, a narrative of this sort begins with some kind of event that seems scarcely worth noticing that, then, is elaborated into a complex, seemingly improvised plot -- the generic story is an account of people looking for a lost dog described by its owners as "shaggy", various enounters that occur during the hunt, and, at last, the revelation that the so-called "shaggy" dog is not shaggy at all. Boon Jong-Ho uses this plot template for Barking Dogs. The effect is a little like Wong Kar-Wei's Chungking Express with its interlocked stories revolving around a cheap, greasy spoon take-out place and films like Michael Haneke's Code Unknown -- disaffected city-dwellers, each isolated from the others, are entangled together by chance events in a narrative. The TV program Seinfeld typically exploited plots of this sort.
In Barking Dogs, a frazzled graduate student is tormented by the yipping of a small shaggy dog. (The story begins in media res and so it takes us some time to unravel the graduate student's motives.) He steals the small white dog, a kind of furry fuzz-ball terrier, and tries to pitch the animal off the rooftop of the large, anonymous apartment building where he lives. He can't bring himself to commit this act, nor can he hang the dog by its leash in the basement of the apartment building. So he locks the dog in an abandoned armoire in the apartment building's basement. Later, he discovers that he has probably seized the wrong dog. There is a granny in the building who is drying radish pickles on the roof and she has a Chihuahua with an irritating bark. The graduate student goes into the basement to rescue the white, shaggy terrier but finds that the apartment maintenance man is cooking the dog on his hibachi. (Here Jong-Ho arrests his plot and has the maintenance man tell a long maniacal story about a murdered janitor named "Boiler Kim" -- in this story, Jong-Ho tips his hand that his narrative will be complex, seemingly ghastly, but, more or less, pointless.) The graduate student, who is badly mistreated by his pregnant wife or girlfriend (she makes him crack walnuts for her, seemingly her only source of sustenance), dognaps the Chihuahua and, ultimately, throws it off the roof of the building. Two slacker girls who work in a toy store (barely work) and have access to a copying machine meet the little girl whose terrier has been eaten. The little girl puts up posters everywhere advertising a reward for the missing (and eaten) terrier. She says that she will commit suicide if her dog isn't found -- but dogs are fungible and, later in the film, we see her dragging another small, and equally irritating, dog on a leash. The slacker toy-store employees see the graduate student pitching the dog off the roof. It turns out that the unfortunate Chihuahua belongs to the old lady who is curing pickled radish on the roof top. The slacker girls pursue the graduate student, hoping to achieve fame in the Korea media by bringing the dognapped to justice. Meanwhile the graduate student's wife or girlfriend has purchased a dog, another nasty little white dog (a poodle), that she names baby. The graduate student loses that dog in a fog of chemical spray and the poodle ends up in the clutches of a homeless vagrant who tries to barbecue the small animal but is beaten-up by the slacker girls. The more attractive slacker girl helps the graduate student as he forlornly (and drunkenly) glues posters showing his missing dog to walls -- there is a distinct erotic tension between the unhappily matched graduate student and the girl, but, true to form, this pseudo-romance goes nowhere. And, so, it goes -- in the end, the two slacker girls are shown hiking in a woods, a distant forest that can be seen from the top of the Brutalist, concrete skyscrapers and that they have long yearned to explore. The graduate student is now a professor, having achieved his academic goals, although he doesn't seem to be too happy. All of this is presented in a fluid, brightly lit schematic style. There are some fantasy interpolations, including the story of another grad student who died when a subway train hit his head while he was projectile vomiting, and a sequence in which the roof-tops of the buildings are crowded with people in yellow hoodies cheering on the slacker girl when she rescues the poodle. Ultimately, the film is as irritating as is its privilege -- it's a genre that is as irritating and petty as the yapping dogs that are its subject. The film is admirably designed, however, and keeps multiple balls up in the air, juggling the different characters with aplomb. The problem that the viewer senses in the film's last third is that a narrative that is intended, fundamentally, as an irritant goes on too long -- this sort of story would be best at about an hour's length and the film seems to be, at least, 115 minute, or so, long. It's an interesting film, but, not good enough to sustain it's length.
In Barking Dogs, a frazzled graduate student is tormented by the yipping of a small shaggy dog. (The story begins in media res and so it takes us some time to unravel the graduate student's motives.) He steals the small white dog, a kind of furry fuzz-ball terrier, and tries to pitch the animal off the rooftop of the large, anonymous apartment building where he lives. He can't bring himself to commit this act, nor can he hang the dog by its leash in the basement of the apartment building. So he locks the dog in an abandoned armoire in the apartment building's basement. Later, he discovers that he has probably seized the wrong dog. There is a granny in the building who is drying radish pickles on the roof and she has a Chihuahua with an irritating bark. The graduate student goes into the basement to rescue the white, shaggy terrier but finds that the apartment maintenance man is cooking the dog on his hibachi. (Here Jong-Ho arrests his plot and has the maintenance man tell a long maniacal story about a murdered janitor named "Boiler Kim" -- in this story, Jong-Ho tips his hand that his narrative will be complex, seemingly ghastly, but, more or less, pointless.) The graduate student, who is badly mistreated by his pregnant wife or girlfriend (she makes him crack walnuts for her, seemingly her only source of sustenance), dognaps the Chihuahua and, ultimately, throws it off the roof of the building. Two slacker girls who work in a toy store (barely work) and have access to a copying machine meet the little girl whose terrier has been eaten. The little girl puts up posters everywhere advertising a reward for the missing (and eaten) terrier. She says that she will commit suicide if her dog isn't found -- but dogs are fungible and, later in the film, we see her dragging another small, and equally irritating, dog on a leash. The slacker toy-store employees see the graduate student pitching the dog off the roof. It turns out that the unfortunate Chihuahua belongs to the old lady who is curing pickled radish on the roof top. The slacker girls pursue the graduate student, hoping to achieve fame in the Korea media by bringing the dognapped to justice. Meanwhile the graduate student's wife or girlfriend has purchased a dog, another nasty little white dog (a poodle), that she names baby. The graduate student loses that dog in a fog of chemical spray and the poodle ends up in the clutches of a homeless vagrant who tries to barbecue the small animal but is beaten-up by the slacker girls. The more attractive slacker girl helps the graduate student as he forlornly (and drunkenly) glues posters showing his missing dog to walls -- there is a distinct erotic tension between the unhappily matched graduate student and the girl, but, true to form, this pseudo-romance goes nowhere. And, so, it goes -- in the end, the two slacker girls are shown hiking in a woods, a distant forest that can be seen from the top of the Brutalist, concrete skyscrapers and that they have long yearned to explore. The graduate student is now a professor, having achieved his academic goals, although he doesn't seem to be too happy. All of this is presented in a fluid, brightly lit schematic style. There are some fantasy interpolations, including the story of another grad student who died when a subway train hit his head while he was projectile vomiting, and a sequence in which the roof-tops of the buildings are crowded with people in yellow hoodies cheering on the slacker girl when she rescues the poodle. Ultimately, the film is as irritating as is its privilege -- it's a genre that is as irritating and petty as the yapping dogs that are its subject. The film is admirably designed, however, and keeps multiple balls up in the air, juggling the different characters with aplomb. The problem that the viewer senses in the film's last third is that a narrative that is intended, fundamentally, as an irritant goes on too long -- this sort of story would be best at about an hour's length and the film seems to be, at least, 115 minute, or so, long. It's an interesting film, but, not good enough to sustain it's length.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Caesar Must Die!
About ten years ago, inmates at a maximum security prison in Rome staged a full-dress version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The production was elaborately mounted, with barbaric-looking costumes, togas, and impressive lighting effects. A large audience attended the production and responded enthusiastically with a standing ovation -- in a haunting sequence, shown twice in the film, the actors shed their costumes and are shown, one by one, being locked in their small cells. Caesar must die! (2011) is a record of auditions, rehearsals, and some moments from the actual stage production -- the film, directed by the Taviani brothers, seems to be partly documentary with some sequences obviously, although effectively, staged. The Taviani brothers have shown an inclination toward silent movies: their film about Italian craftsmen working on Griffith's Intolerance, Good Morning Babylon (1987) -- is a noteworthy example. Their grave and ennobling approach to the prisoners performing Julius Caesar may seem primitive to some audiences: they eschew any sort of rapid cutting and their use of montage is schematic: they tend to repeat the same scene over and over again, simply showing different actors going through their paces. (In the thematically central sequence in which the prisoners are locked back in their cells, we see each man ushered into his cell by a guard, the shots all identically staged with the same camera position, lighting, duration, and action -- the repetition heightens the effect of imprisonment.) Characters are introduced by medium shots with the figure facing the camera and speaking to it. Titles are copiously used to provide information, creating a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, and the staging tends toward carefully lit tableaux. The direction strives for maximum clarity within the shot and there is little analytical cutting or fragmentation of scenes into close-shots for effect. Scenes involving rehearsals, staged at various locations throughout the prison, are shot in black and white. The conceit is that the actual theater can not be used for rehearsals and the cast must make due with what is available to them -- in fact, the Taviani's stage most of the play in sequence at various locations in the prison that most effectively promote (and amplify) the meaning of the scenes that we see. The two famous orations by Brutus and Antony are delivered in a small prison courtyard with the inmates reacting to these speeches gathered behind cage-like windows in the barren walls of the prison yard. (Some of these sequences look a bit like Peter Brooks' famous imagery in Marat/Sade, a film clearly influential on the Taviani's approach to this movie.) Conspiracy scenes take place in narrow corridors and periodically the directors cut to a long shot of the grim-looking prison to remind us where the action is taking place. Many of the more intimate scenes are filmed as rehearsals, in the cells, with the actors ostensibly trying to memorize their lines and cell-mates periodically commenting or interrupting them. The film is remarkably ingenious in conveying the essence of the Shakespearian play with limited resources and, under the guise, that we are watching rehearsals -- indeed, in some of the most effective scenes the actors read their lines from the script. From time to time, the players get into fights and there are some chilling sequences in which the convicts try to intimidate one another or react so intensely to the material that they are performing that actual violence seems imminent. Shakespeare's majestic language smooths out the rough edges in Plutarch's stories. in his biographies, Plutarch's noble Romans always behave like Mafia capos and, of course, here many of the actors are, in fact, serving long terms for organized crime activities -- these guys aren't playing Mafiosi, they are real mobsters. The film is short -- only 77 minutes long and, of course, aspects of the play that involve Portia and Calpurnia can't be staged: there are no women in the jail and the Taviani's don't go so far as to require the convicts to perform in drag. (We see one actor lovingly stroking a seat in the auditorium and musing "Maybe a woman will sit here.") The acting is uniformly excellent, on the level with the very finest acting at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Guthrie Theater. Shakespeare in translation and subtitled always seems muted -- the music of the language is lost. However, there is a certain frisson to seeing actual Romans (or Sicilians) performing Shakespeare -- the men often profess that they have a more profound understanding of the play because of their backgrounds. One man cries out: "This Shakespeare, he must have known the street where I grew up." Another man, an impressive fellow who plays Caesar, is shown reading De bello Gallica and marveling at Caesar's genius. The film's high concept is utterly true to Shakespeare's play -- the conspirators plot and kill in the name of freedom, but history reminds us that their actions only inspire the rise of the cold and authoritarian Octavian -- they have killed one aspirant to the throne only to assure that another more ruthless emperor will seize power. This theme creates enormous resonance in the images of the actors being locked up in their cells after the success of the play. Nothing, ultimately, was accomplished -- liberty was lost any way. And, indeed, the film suggests a level of tragedy that exceeds Shakespeare's play -- one of the actors ruefully says (it's the films last line): "Now that I have experienced art, I truly know that this room is a cell" -- in other words, art doesn't liberate anyone: it just makes us more keenly aware of our imprisonment.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
First Man
I was fourteen in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. On the day after watching the televised moon-walk, I recall riding my bicycle as fast as I could around all the familiar streets in my neighborhood. (I have one visual memory of bright sunlight and cresting a hill on my bike and, ahead of me, the neighborhood was spread out along the steep slopes where our residential streets overlooked an old, abandoned gravel pit.) I felt a wild, electric exhilaration. If I had thought about growing old and the unknown years ahead of me, I would have thought that a dramatization of the moon-landing made as a movie in the year 2018 would most likely have been filmed on location, near one of the thriving moon-bases in the Sea of Tranquility. Of course, we all turned away from outer space and, I think, there is a trace of that failure of nerve or imagination or whatever you want to call it in Damien Chazelle's epic about the first moon-shot, First Man (2018).
First Man demonstrates how a powerful and heroic subject can triumph over a willfully perverse approach to that material. Despite myself, I found First Man terrifically moving and, although, of course, I knew the story, not only gripping but occasionally suspenseful. Ryan Gosling plays the part of Neil Armstrong, delivering a performance that is hermetically locked-in and understated to the point of almost vanishing -- apparently, Gosling's self-contained and laconic acting is an accurate account of what Armstrong was like, but, from the outset, the film feels a little crippled by the hero's emotional incapacity; the astronaut is a complete cipher -- except for one scene in which he weeps briefly over his little daughter's death, Armstrong never gets angry, shows no fear, and earnestly avoids saying anything that could be construed as witty or, even, meaningful. Despite it's epic subject, the film is intentionally ugly -- at least, half the shots are filmed with a handheld camera: everything looks wobbly and improvised. There are far too many close-ups particularly since the astronauts are, more or less, inexpressive, particularly the hero. Furthermore, almost all of the terrestrial sequences are dimly lit -- everything is bathed in shadow. We see fragments of faces and the interiors of suburban homes feature little pools of light where people huddle in the Rembrandt-brown gloom. (As Dolly Parton famously observed, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap -- the low-key darkness in many scenes is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very high-tech and carefully manipulated lighting.) The film is written like a documentary -- we see Armstrong piloting an X-15 into outer space and, almost, burning up when he re-enters the atmosphere. His daughter dies in a series of tasteful, oblique, and moving scenes. Then, he is selected for the space program, trained to be an astronaut, and, shot into space, on a mission to dock his two-man capsule with a floating space station, the Aegina. This mission almost results in his death -- the capsule goes into a barrel-roll and both astronauts almost pass out before somehow the problem is corrected. (There is a lot of jargon uttered on radio transmissions and innumerable shots of instrument panels displaying God knows what -- the film makes very little effort to explain any of the technical issues at stake in the space travel scenes.) There is a calamity when, during a test, three astronauts are burned to death in a sealed space capsule (it's an electrical fire). Chief among the dead is Gus Grissom who was one of Armstrong's closest friends. We get glimpses of anti-war protests and TV shots of Vietnam. Kurt Vonnegut says that he thinks that the money devoted to the space program should be used to make New York City more livable while the bespectacled Arthur C. Clarke looks on bemused. Armstrong is almost killed when a lunar landing simulator crashes. Then, he is shot into space with the abrasive Buzz Aldrin. He and Aldrin land on the moon, walk about a little bit, and, then, return to earth. In the last scene, which is silent, Armstrong and his wife look at one another through a glass window -- he is in quarantine for fear that he will bring moon-germs to earth. They gesture at one another but don't know what to say -- the scene is desperately sad: Armstrong is shown to be a prisoner of his own majestic and impenetrable reserve -- he is like someone serving hard time in jail and can't be reached, even by his longsuffering wife. It's a curiously depressive ending and, in keeping with the anti-triumphal rendering of the moon landing itself. While walking on the moon, Armstrong recalls family outings with his daughter who died when she was a mere toddler. We see verdant landscapes full of sun and green shadow and these images are intercut with the barren, abstract desolation of the moon -- the moon is a vast expanse of grey dust, a kind of awful, lonely void that seems to epitomize Armstrong's eerie imperturbability and his frightening aloofness. The sweet, wet, green, muddy world, shown in impressionistic landscapes, is where everything that matters to us is to be found. There's nothing in outer space but the risk of a lonely and terrible death and a great emptiness. The moon is shown to be a horrible place and, by his direction, Chazelle suggests that the terrible void of the moon is, somehow, akin to the darkness of the grave that has stolen away Armstrong's little daughter and frozen his emotions. Why didn't we return to the moon? Because, the film suggests, there was nothing there but a kind of nihilistic, awful loneliness. I have many reservations about this film and am critical of the showy nonchalance (all the jerky camera movements and unnecessary close-ups) with which the movie is made -- this nonchalance is all completely contrived. I assume a production like this was story-boarded to within an inch of its life. But the film's grandiose subject and its awesome images of space travel overcome the film's questionable mise-en-scene. (There's one scene that rings completely false -- Armstrong is packing and doesn't want to see his boys before he leaves because he's afraid he may not be coming back. A man of Armstrong's generation would never have packed his own bags -- that's what wives were for. And his wife, irritated at him, uses a profanity in great currency today but which would never have been uttered by a prim housewife in 1969). Chazelle's earlier film with Gosling, LaLa Land was a movie musical that was also borderline nihilistic in its weird tone of despair and regret. Curiously, First Man and LaLa Land share a deep melancholy that seems quite at odds with their subjects. But both films are estimable projects and First Man is very exciting from beginning to end.
First Man demonstrates how a powerful and heroic subject can triumph over a willfully perverse approach to that material. Despite myself, I found First Man terrifically moving and, although, of course, I knew the story, not only gripping but occasionally suspenseful. Ryan Gosling plays the part of Neil Armstrong, delivering a performance that is hermetically locked-in and understated to the point of almost vanishing -- apparently, Gosling's self-contained and laconic acting is an accurate account of what Armstrong was like, but, from the outset, the film feels a little crippled by the hero's emotional incapacity; the astronaut is a complete cipher -- except for one scene in which he weeps briefly over his little daughter's death, Armstrong never gets angry, shows no fear, and earnestly avoids saying anything that could be construed as witty or, even, meaningful. Despite it's epic subject, the film is intentionally ugly -- at least, half the shots are filmed with a handheld camera: everything looks wobbly and improvised. There are far too many close-ups particularly since the astronauts are, more or less, inexpressive, particularly the hero. Furthermore, almost all of the terrestrial sequences are dimly lit -- everything is bathed in shadow. We see fragments of faces and the interiors of suburban homes feature little pools of light where people huddle in the Rembrandt-brown gloom. (As Dolly Parton famously observed, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap -- the low-key darkness in many scenes is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very high-tech and carefully manipulated lighting.) The film is written like a documentary -- we see Armstrong piloting an X-15 into outer space and, almost, burning up when he re-enters the atmosphere. His daughter dies in a series of tasteful, oblique, and moving scenes. Then, he is selected for the space program, trained to be an astronaut, and, shot into space, on a mission to dock his two-man capsule with a floating space station, the Aegina. This mission almost results in his death -- the capsule goes into a barrel-roll and both astronauts almost pass out before somehow the problem is corrected. (There is a lot of jargon uttered on radio transmissions and innumerable shots of instrument panels displaying God knows what -- the film makes very little effort to explain any of the technical issues at stake in the space travel scenes.) There is a calamity when, during a test, three astronauts are burned to death in a sealed space capsule (it's an electrical fire). Chief among the dead is Gus Grissom who was one of Armstrong's closest friends. We get glimpses of anti-war protests and TV shots of Vietnam. Kurt Vonnegut says that he thinks that the money devoted to the space program should be used to make New York City more livable while the bespectacled Arthur C. Clarke looks on bemused. Armstrong is almost killed when a lunar landing simulator crashes. Then, he is shot into space with the abrasive Buzz Aldrin. He and Aldrin land on the moon, walk about a little bit, and, then, return to earth. In the last scene, which is silent, Armstrong and his wife look at one another through a glass window -- he is in quarantine for fear that he will bring moon-germs to earth. They gesture at one another but don't know what to say -- the scene is desperately sad: Armstrong is shown to be a prisoner of his own majestic and impenetrable reserve -- he is like someone serving hard time in jail and can't be reached, even by his longsuffering wife. It's a curiously depressive ending and, in keeping with the anti-triumphal rendering of the moon landing itself. While walking on the moon, Armstrong recalls family outings with his daughter who died when she was a mere toddler. We see verdant landscapes full of sun and green shadow and these images are intercut with the barren, abstract desolation of the moon -- the moon is a vast expanse of grey dust, a kind of awful, lonely void that seems to epitomize Armstrong's eerie imperturbability and his frightening aloofness. The sweet, wet, green, muddy world, shown in impressionistic landscapes, is where everything that matters to us is to be found. There's nothing in outer space but the risk of a lonely and terrible death and a great emptiness. The moon is shown to be a horrible place and, by his direction, Chazelle suggests that the terrible void of the moon is, somehow, akin to the darkness of the grave that has stolen away Armstrong's little daughter and frozen his emotions. Why didn't we return to the moon? Because, the film suggests, there was nothing there but a kind of nihilistic, awful loneliness. I have many reservations about this film and am critical of the showy nonchalance (all the jerky camera movements and unnecessary close-ups) with which the movie is made -- this nonchalance is all completely contrived. I assume a production like this was story-boarded to within an inch of its life. But the film's grandiose subject and its awesome images of space travel overcome the film's questionable mise-en-scene. (There's one scene that rings completely false -- Armstrong is packing and doesn't want to see his boys before he leaves because he's afraid he may not be coming back. A man of Armstrong's generation would never have packed his own bags -- that's what wives were for. And his wife, irritated at him, uses a profanity in great currency today but which would never have been uttered by a prim housewife in 1969). Chazelle's earlier film with Gosling, LaLa Land was a movie musical that was also borderline nihilistic in its weird tone of despair and regret. Curiously, First Man and LaLa Land share a deep melancholy that seems quite at odds with their subjects. But both films are estimable projects and First Man is very exciting from beginning to end.
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Hold the Dark
In the 19th century, novelists built plots around character and social interaction -- a conventional novel showed men and women demonstrating character traits against the backdrop of a well-defined social milieu. Characters in literature had children and parents, siblings, friends, associates, bosses, servants, and enemies. Actions were embedded in society and represented alternative approaches to dealing with roles assigned by that society. Around 1900, some novels, although ostensibly realistic, featured set-pieces, that is, episodes that stood just a little to the side of social norms and that were intended to symbolize or dramatize otherwise abstract issues and, also, provide a modicum of excitement and, even, commercially viable, thrills. These novels are precursors to the movies. The greatest book that is a precursor to the early movies is Frank Norris' The Octopus -- in that novel, Norris devises shoot-outs and train chases as well as a climactic banquet intercut with poor people starving on the street to illustrate the philosophical and historical propositions that his book advances. The plot becomes a framework from which to suspend picturesque confrontations, elaborate depictions of parties and social events (the "rabbit drive" and Annixter's barn-raising party), and scenes of violence. The plot is still primary and the dramatic incidents illustrating the narrative remain secondary. But, as time, advances, films, in particular, seem to develop in the direction of preferring the bravura set-piece episodes to the narrative itself. Apocalypse Now is an excellent example -- there is a plot and, by recent standards, it is reasonably well-developed but what people recall about the movie is elaborate visual arias: the helicopter attack or the bridge under attack illumined with psychedelic Christmas tree lights. Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark (Netflix 2018) is an example of a film that is, in effect, post-narrative. There seems to be a plot, but, in fact, upon any kind of logical analysis, there is no story at all -- there are situations, highly choreographed episodes of ultra-violence, stunning landscapes, and an overall atmosphere of utter despair, but no narrative emerges from anything. Indeed, the film is resolutely anti-narrative -- it doesn't provide any motivations sufficient for the carnage that we display. In Hold the Dark, we get all the mayhem and violence but without any backstory that would make what we see meaningful. I have no idea what this impressive, but ultimately futile, film is supposed to be about.
In one typically enigmatic sequence, a grieving mother, driven to distraction because wolves have seized her child, tells the protagonist, Ronald Kor (Jeremy Wright) that "the sky is strange." At the end of the movie, after about sixty homicides, the same woman stands over the severely wounded Kor and says: "Do you see what I meant when I said the 'the sky is strange'?" Is this some sort of taunt? Obviously, the bloodied Kor has no idea what she means and neither does the viewer. "The sky is strange" -- how? in what respect? why? is this a fantasy or some kind of meteorological observation or a metaphor that we can't decipher? The film doesn't explicate and we don't know. And this is characteristic of the whole enterprise.
Kor is a wolf researcher who seems to have written a book about spending time with a wolf pack. (We don't know anything about the book except that it exists -- the grieving mother asserts that Kor killed a wolf once. But we know nothing about this either.) Medora Sloane, the mother of the missing child, scribbles a letter to the writer, a civilized, unassuming man, asking him to come to Keelut, a tiny Alaskan town where three children have been seized (supposedly) by wolves. Kor is estranged from his daughter (why?) and she works in Anchorage (why?). He decides to visit her and this becomes, it seems, his rationale for going to Keelut. Later in the film, there is some gibberish about Kor being required as a "witness" -- but the film doesn't establish what Kor is supposed to be "witnessing" or why it is important to have someone see the horrors that he beholds. And, if a witness is needed, how come the villagers so assiduously work to eliminate all others who could attest to their bizarre behavior.
Keelut is in the back of the beyond, a sinister assemblage of shacks in the middle of a huge forest over which great snow-capped mountains loom. (It's actually the Canadian Rockies around Banff). Most of the people seem to be Native-Americans and, possibly, witches or shape-shifters, "skin-walkers." In the town, everyone speaks in portentous whispers and most of what they say is totally enigmatic -- like malevolent fortunes in a Chinese fortune cookie. Just as we are getting used to the bad vibes in Keelut, Saulnier cuts away to some more horrific stuff: people being blown apart and burned to death in Fallujah where Vernon Sloane, Medora's husband, is blithely killing folks with a huge, high caliber machine-gun mounted on a tank or hum-vee. There's a totally gratuitous rape scene in which Vernon knifes another soldier, possibly a GI although we don't know for sure, and, then, helpfully leaves the blade with the victim so she can torture the disabled bad guy. It turns out that the little boy missing in Keelut is in the basement, apparently strangled by his completely depressed mother. (She greets Kor, her alleged savior, with a barrage of whispered insults, then, takes a bath muttering various bizarre and unsettling incantations -- wearing a Yupik mask, she then comes naked (except for the wooden mask) to bed and hops in with Kor, a fellow who seems so terminally morose that this just adds to his despair.) Vernon Sloane, badly wounded in Fallujah (Saulnier likes neck wounds that rhythmically spurt black blood) returns to Alaska. For some reason, he starts murdering everyone. He kills a couple cops and the coroner and steals his son's corpse which he hides in a small wooden box buried in a snow bank. One of the guys that he shoots in the face is killed, apparently, because he speculated that Medora has been suffering from "post-partum that can go on for years." In this film, if you try to figure out an explanation for what is happening, someone is liable to reward you with a bullet in the mouth. The cops hunt for Sloane. They go to Keelut where one of Sloane's buddies, an Indian named something like Cheeon, unveils a huge machine gun, similar to the weapon used by Sloane in Fallujah, and shoots to pieces about a dozen cops. The machine gun battle which is completely unmotivated goes on for about ten minutes -- it's very loud and bloody. Sloane goes to an abandoned mine where he gratuitously kills another man, then, locates an old friend to remove some buckshot in his shoulder -- an old lady at the mine wearing pop-bottle bottom glasses has shot him. After the buckshot is removed, Sloane rewards his buddy by donning a Yupik wooden mask of a wolf and killing that man. With the sheriff, poor Kor flies to a remote canyon where there is a hot spring in a cave. ("You can get really clean there," Medora has told him.) Vernon Sloane is lurking around in his wolf mask and he systematically hunts down the sheriff and Kor. Kor gets badly wounded but is left alive to witness the encounter between Vernon and his wife, the murderous Medora. Medora yanks off Sloane's homicide face, the wolf mask, and they apparently reconcile. Kor crawls through the snow while, in the penultimate scene, we see Medora and Vernon tramping through the snow pulling the little boy's pine casket behind them. Kor's daughter sees him in the hospital and, on this note, the film ends.
Simply put, there is no motivation for anything that we see in the movie. We have no idea why Medora killed her son. We can make various surmises but none of them are confirmed by the film's anti-narrative. (Did she want to get Vernon back from the war by the expedient of making his little boy vanish? Who knows?) There is absolutely no justification for Vernon's killing spree other than the fact that he is wearing a wolf-mask. No explanation is given for the showy machine gun battle with the dozen casualties in Keeluk. At one point, wolves are seen tearing apart a cub -- they are "savaging" the cub because resources are scarce. But what this has to do with the rest of the plot (or anti-plot) is unclear. Where are Vernon and Medora going at the end of the film? Why are they dragging the casket behind them? Is the white-haired Indian woman who cares for the wounded Kor at the film's ending a wolf? If so, why? Are other characters supposed to be wolves? Why is Kor estranged from his daughter? At one point, a sinister-looking Native witch woman notes that Keelut has been cursed from the start -- the "influenza" killed many of the people living there 70 years earlier and the corpses were put in "snow igloos", but wolves came and tore the corpses apart so that "there was nothing to bury." But what is this story supposed to mean? It's all darkness, doom and gloom, but we have no idea why people are doing the gruesome things we see. In a laudatory article in Film Comment, the reviewer praises the film's relentlessly depressive tone. But the reviewer entirely ignores whole sequences in the movie, apparently unable to figure them out -- for instance, the utterly pointless sequence where Vernon goes to an abandoned mine, confronts the spectral people there, and kills one of them. What is that sequence supposed to mean? The reviewer praises the machine gun fight as state-of-the-art violence, but he doesn't explain what the movie is supposed to be about or, even, if it is about anything at all. Saulnier is certainly immensely talented when it comes to violence and creating an atmosphere of lurking horror (although he borrows from other filmmakers -- some of the scenes of Kor coming to Keelut are cribbed from Kubrick's The Shining minus the "Dies Irae" music which wouldn't be out of place in this venture). But he's too lazy to figure out what the spectacular set-pieces that he orchestrates are supposed to mean. The film isn't only baffling, it's meanings are intentionally obfuscated -- but to what effect? Why?
In one typically enigmatic sequence, a grieving mother, driven to distraction because wolves have seized her child, tells the protagonist, Ronald Kor (Jeremy Wright) that "the sky is strange." At the end of the movie, after about sixty homicides, the same woman stands over the severely wounded Kor and says: "Do you see what I meant when I said the 'the sky is strange'?" Is this some sort of taunt? Obviously, the bloodied Kor has no idea what she means and neither does the viewer. "The sky is strange" -- how? in what respect? why? is this a fantasy or some kind of meteorological observation or a metaphor that we can't decipher? The film doesn't explicate and we don't know. And this is characteristic of the whole enterprise.
Kor is a wolf researcher who seems to have written a book about spending time with a wolf pack. (We don't know anything about the book except that it exists -- the grieving mother asserts that Kor killed a wolf once. But we know nothing about this either.) Medora Sloane, the mother of the missing child, scribbles a letter to the writer, a civilized, unassuming man, asking him to come to Keelut, a tiny Alaskan town where three children have been seized (supposedly) by wolves. Kor is estranged from his daughter (why?) and she works in Anchorage (why?). He decides to visit her and this becomes, it seems, his rationale for going to Keelut. Later in the film, there is some gibberish about Kor being required as a "witness" -- but the film doesn't establish what Kor is supposed to be "witnessing" or why it is important to have someone see the horrors that he beholds. And, if a witness is needed, how come the villagers so assiduously work to eliminate all others who could attest to their bizarre behavior.
Keelut is in the back of the beyond, a sinister assemblage of shacks in the middle of a huge forest over which great snow-capped mountains loom. (It's actually the Canadian Rockies around Banff). Most of the people seem to be Native-Americans and, possibly, witches or shape-shifters, "skin-walkers." In the town, everyone speaks in portentous whispers and most of what they say is totally enigmatic -- like malevolent fortunes in a Chinese fortune cookie. Just as we are getting used to the bad vibes in Keelut, Saulnier cuts away to some more horrific stuff: people being blown apart and burned to death in Fallujah where Vernon Sloane, Medora's husband, is blithely killing folks with a huge, high caliber machine-gun mounted on a tank or hum-vee. There's a totally gratuitous rape scene in which Vernon knifes another soldier, possibly a GI although we don't know for sure, and, then, helpfully leaves the blade with the victim so she can torture the disabled bad guy. It turns out that the little boy missing in Keelut is in the basement, apparently strangled by his completely depressed mother. (She greets Kor, her alleged savior, with a barrage of whispered insults, then, takes a bath muttering various bizarre and unsettling incantations -- wearing a Yupik mask, she then comes naked (except for the wooden mask) to bed and hops in with Kor, a fellow who seems so terminally morose that this just adds to his despair.) Vernon Sloane, badly wounded in Fallujah (Saulnier likes neck wounds that rhythmically spurt black blood) returns to Alaska. For some reason, he starts murdering everyone. He kills a couple cops and the coroner and steals his son's corpse which he hides in a small wooden box buried in a snow bank. One of the guys that he shoots in the face is killed, apparently, because he speculated that Medora has been suffering from "post-partum that can go on for years." In this film, if you try to figure out an explanation for what is happening, someone is liable to reward you with a bullet in the mouth. The cops hunt for Sloane. They go to Keelut where one of Sloane's buddies, an Indian named something like Cheeon, unveils a huge machine gun, similar to the weapon used by Sloane in Fallujah, and shoots to pieces about a dozen cops. The machine gun battle which is completely unmotivated goes on for about ten minutes -- it's very loud and bloody. Sloane goes to an abandoned mine where he gratuitously kills another man, then, locates an old friend to remove some buckshot in his shoulder -- an old lady at the mine wearing pop-bottle bottom glasses has shot him. After the buckshot is removed, Sloane rewards his buddy by donning a Yupik wooden mask of a wolf and killing that man. With the sheriff, poor Kor flies to a remote canyon where there is a hot spring in a cave. ("You can get really clean there," Medora has told him.) Vernon Sloane is lurking around in his wolf mask and he systematically hunts down the sheriff and Kor. Kor gets badly wounded but is left alive to witness the encounter between Vernon and his wife, the murderous Medora. Medora yanks off Sloane's homicide face, the wolf mask, and they apparently reconcile. Kor crawls through the snow while, in the penultimate scene, we see Medora and Vernon tramping through the snow pulling the little boy's pine casket behind them. Kor's daughter sees him in the hospital and, on this note, the film ends.
Simply put, there is no motivation for anything that we see in the movie. We have no idea why Medora killed her son. We can make various surmises but none of them are confirmed by the film's anti-narrative. (Did she want to get Vernon back from the war by the expedient of making his little boy vanish? Who knows?) There is absolutely no justification for Vernon's killing spree other than the fact that he is wearing a wolf-mask. No explanation is given for the showy machine gun battle with the dozen casualties in Keeluk. At one point, wolves are seen tearing apart a cub -- they are "savaging" the cub because resources are scarce. But what this has to do with the rest of the plot (or anti-plot) is unclear. Where are Vernon and Medora going at the end of the film? Why are they dragging the casket behind them? Is the white-haired Indian woman who cares for the wounded Kor at the film's ending a wolf? If so, why? Are other characters supposed to be wolves? Why is Kor estranged from his daughter? At one point, a sinister-looking Native witch woman notes that Keelut has been cursed from the start -- the "influenza" killed many of the people living there 70 years earlier and the corpses were put in "snow igloos", but wolves came and tore the corpses apart so that "there was nothing to bury." But what is this story supposed to mean? It's all darkness, doom and gloom, but we have no idea why people are doing the gruesome things we see. In a laudatory article in Film Comment, the reviewer praises the film's relentlessly depressive tone. But the reviewer entirely ignores whole sequences in the movie, apparently unable to figure them out -- for instance, the utterly pointless sequence where Vernon goes to an abandoned mine, confronts the spectral people there, and kills one of them. What is that sequence supposed to mean? The reviewer praises the machine gun fight as state-of-the-art violence, but he doesn't explain what the movie is supposed to be about or, even, if it is about anything at all. Saulnier is certainly immensely talented when it comes to violence and creating an atmosphere of lurking horror (although he borrows from other filmmakers -- some of the scenes of Kor coming to Keelut are cribbed from Kubrick's The Shining minus the "Dies Irae" music which wouldn't be out of place in this venture). But he's too lazy to figure out what the spectacular set-pieces that he orchestrates are supposed to mean. The film isn't only baffling, it's meanings are intentionally obfuscated -- but to what effect? Why?
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez
Robert Young's Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1981 - 1983) is a film that is much better than it looks. In fact, the picture is a masterpiece but, because of its rebarbative Modernist structure, the movie is very hard to appreciate. The greatest films are both beautiful and profound. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is profound but, intentionally, eschews beauty -- it's Brechtian and invites thought, but never draws you into an uncritical identification with its characters or with its ostensible genre, the chase Western. I misunderstood most of the film on first viewing -- that's another difficulty with the movie: the revelation of a plot point that motivates much of the movie is withheld until the film's last twenty minutes. With that "reveal" in mind, the viewer really needs to see the movie a second time. This was impossible in theaters and, so, the movie failed in that venue. It has taken re-issue of the film by Criterion for viewers to fully appreciate the complex narrative strategy and symbolism that the picture only gradually, and, as it were under duress, reveals.
In simplest analysis, the film's story can be told in a few words: A Mexican-American, Cortez, shoots a sheriff and is pursued by armies of Texas Rangers; the lone horseman is finally captured and put on trial for murder -- he is convicted, but, later, the conviction is reversed and there are more trials, many years of imprisonment, and, then, Cortez is pardoned. Two-thirds of the film is devoted to the chase; the last third of the film reveals motivations and argues the facts in the trial scenes. (The structure, as has been often noted, is a bit like The Man who shot Liberty Valence -- a climactic trial reveals what the rest of the film means.) The theme of the movie is revealed late in the film. All of the bloody mayhem shown by the film is the result of the mistranslation of a single Spanish word -- therefore, the film is about communication and misunderstanding. In an opening sequence, we see Gregorio Cortez on horseback riding through the scrub with a posse chasing him -- the sequence is shot perversely in the darkness: the sun isn't just setting, but it has already set and the edges of the images are rimmed in red with tomato-colored flares on the lenses. The scene looks strange and isn't even remotely exciting because we can barely see what is happening. But this is thematic -- the movie is metaphorically about the darkness of misunderstanding and, so, the images of people chasing each other in the night, that is, unable to see one another clearly, is crucial to the movie's symbolism. The problem is that we don't know this until we have seen the whole film. Another sequence will suffice to illustrate the interpretive problems the movie presents: a Texas Ranger, the man leading the hunt, is talking on a primitive telephone (the film is set in 1901 in West Texas). The scene goes on and on with the Ranger shouting into the phone and unable to make himself understood. The viewer gets irritated -- what is the point of a scene illustrating the deficiencies of turn-of-the-20th century telephones? But, later, we learn that the whole film turns on a miscommunication -- the old "telephone" game played between languages. With one startling exception, the movie withholds from the viewer the standard pleasures of a Western -- there seem to be too many close-ups and the camera is often placed in a position that is uncommunicative. The gunfights are chaotic affairs with people swinging their guns as they shoot like clubs, seemingly forgetting that the weapon is a firearm, and everyone is killed at close-range in brawls that don't make any sense. The film shows little sense of topography -- although with one great exception. When Cortez is trapped in a box canyon, he simply escapes off-screen -- we don't know how he accomplishes this act: this sort of derring-do is not what interests the film-maker and, so, he blithely avoids staging what would be an exciting sequence in most movies. As a Spanish-speaking peasant, Cortez is invisible unless a posse is chasing him -- he waters his horse at a Hill Country pond while other cowboys simply ignore him. In one surprising scene, Cortez goes into a café and eats lunch while the place is crowded with Texas Rangers who have just been chasing him -- they don't know what he looks like and Mexicans literally "can't be seen" unless they are criminals. There is a annoyingly long sequence in which Cortez eats with a cowhand who has been riding fences for two months. The Anglo cow-hand is desperately lonely and talks to Cortez for what purports to be hours, knowing full well that Cortez has no idea what he is saying -- this is also thematic, although the viewer doesn't know it when the scene actually plays. In the chase scenes, the pursuing posse usually seem so close to Cortez that it is unimaginable that they would not catch him -- the viewer first curses the director ("this man doesn't even know how to stage a horse chase") but, then, grasps, at last, that the horse chases aren't the point of the movie: they are just punctuation. And, as I will note below, when he wants a horse chase to excite the viewer, Young stages one of the greatest episodes of this kind in the history of the Western. The trial scenes are under-dramatized, basically forums for the kind of florid oratory that lawyers favored 120 years ago -- they are realistic but not exciting or suspenseful. Young's point is that Cortez story is instantly converted into something other than the bare facts -- it becomes a springboard for Ciceronian rhetoric in the court room, it sells newspaper as journalism, and, most importantly, it becomes the basis of a border ballad, a corrido that is still sung today and that we see performed in a makeshift theater where Mexicans are raising money for Cortez' defense. Facts are never just the facts -- they are politicized, sensationalized, and, ultimately, turned into mythology.
In the supplemental material on the disc, Edward James Olmos, the Chicano star who was instrumental in getting this picture produced, repeatedly says that the movie is the movie was stated to be "the most authentic historical picture ever produced" by the American Historical Society. But every narrative strategy in the film cuts against this perception -- in fact, the film feels hyper-modern, cubist, a bit like Rossellini's late didactic films or Antonioni's Blow Up. Lens flares are ubiquitous, always reminding the viewer that there is a camera between us and what the film shows. The movie has a complicated structure of flashbacks, sometimes, the same scene shown from two different perspectives, and the narrative is not chronological but choppy with cuts back and forth between different time-frames. The editing is confusing -- this seems to me to be an unintentional defect and, on first watching the film, my main note to myself was that I couldn't understand the obstructive nature of the editing. The soundtrack is Vangelis-style techno-pop that seems jarring, particularly since the movie is ostensibly based on a folk ballad. Camera set-ups are intentionally uncommunicative. Often the film looks ugly -- it was shot on 16 mm in natural light and scenes are either too dark or too bright. (The movie was made for what we would call PBS today, shown 17 times on TV, and, then, basically shelved after it failed with test audiences at the box office; the picture was also financed by Redford's Sundance Institute, one of the first movies to be sponsored by that organization, and, paid for, in part, as well, by La Raza. One of the places where the film was shot was Chama, New Mexico, the site of a Gregorio Cortez-style manhunt that almost erupted into Civil War between the Anglos and the Latinos in the late sixties -- that manhunt also arose from the shooting of a sheriff and his deputy at a courthouse. It's not clear to me what happened when scenes were shot at Chama, only a decade after the big gunfights in that area -- whatever occurred Olmos and the others choose not to talk about this.) A commitment to shooting on actual locations requires the filmmakers to make perverse choices in the jail and trial scenes -- it's too dark in many of these shots and the space makes no sense: there seems to be a gallows in the jail (and there was in fact) but the camera angles don't ever really show you the environment presumably because it was too tight to put a camera anywhere to survey the scene. Most radically, the Spanish in the movie is not translated -- we don't see an interpreter until the film is almost over. Young doesn't give us any subtitles and, so, when the characters speak in Spanish we can only guess what they are saying -- again, this is powerfully thematic since the film's theme is miscommunication across the language barrier. But one can imagine the confusion that the film caused when it was first shown -- it seems that the first and most enthusiastic audiences to embrace the film were bilingual Chicanos who saw the movie in theaters at free screenings hosted by La Raza when the picture was first completed.) In another riff on the theme of miscommunication, Young stages a scene with the victorious Texas Rangers drinking toasts to their capture of Cortez -- he uses Altman style overlapping dialogue, so densely mixed that we can't really hear what any of the men are saying -- it's just a mumble of syllables, a modernist device for making even English, the majority audience's home tongue, seem incomprehensible. Some parts of the movie just don't make sense: we see Cortez gazing down at the Rio Grande and know that he is within a few hundred yards of escaping into Mexico. But in the next scene he is huddled in tiny shack at the bottom of a deep hollow and surrounded by Texas Rangers -- he is captured without a shot being fired, a deliberate and audience-unfriendly anti-climax. (For my taste, Olmos is too pathetic in some scenes -- he has big Bill Keane eyes and looks like a wounded bird and he is always kissing or hugging his horse in an endearing way: these latter gestures, however, are also realistic; everyone agrees that Cortez is a consummate horseman and, in fact, his skill with these animals is what keeps him ahead of the armies of Texas Rangers chasing him.)
In short, the film's apparent deficiencies, except, I think, the bad editing, are all thematic. In one scene, a herd of Texas Rangers chases Cortez to a high ridge. From atop the ridge, Cortez can see a train steaming forward and the entire shimmering plain blocked by skirmish lines of riders charging uphill toward him. Cortez drives his horse down the steep hill, riding right at the approaching horsemen -- then, he turns sharply and rides along the front of their approaching column while the air puffs and smokes with pistol and rifle shots. The men on the train start shooting at Cortez and his galloping horse as well. Cortez outruns the train locomotive in a welter of Soviet-style montage (the horse's legs rhythmically intercut with the train engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive's fiery maw) and, then, crossing the tracks, speeds under a high railroad trestle, galloping through the shadows cast by the engine and its cars as the train crosses the bridge. This is one of the most thrilling and brilliantly choreographed action sequences ever filmed and shows what Young could do if action for action's sake interested him.
In simplest analysis, the film's story can be told in a few words: A Mexican-American, Cortez, shoots a sheriff and is pursued by armies of Texas Rangers; the lone horseman is finally captured and put on trial for murder -- he is convicted, but, later, the conviction is reversed and there are more trials, many years of imprisonment, and, then, Cortez is pardoned. Two-thirds of the film is devoted to the chase; the last third of the film reveals motivations and argues the facts in the trial scenes. (The structure, as has been often noted, is a bit like The Man who shot Liberty Valence -- a climactic trial reveals what the rest of the film means.) The theme of the movie is revealed late in the film. All of the bloody mayhem shown by the film is the result of the mistranslation of a single Spanish word -- therefore, the film is about communication and misunderstanding. In an opening sequence, we see Gregorio Cortez on horseback riding through the scrub with a posse chasing him -- the sequence is shot perversely in the darkness: the sun isn't just setting, but it has already set and the edges of the images are rimmed in red with tomato-colored flares on the lenses. The scene looks strange and isn't even remotely exciting because we can barely see what is happening. But this is thematic -- the movie is metaphorically about the darkness of misunderstanding and, so, the images of people chasing each other in the night, that is, unable to see one another clearly, is crucial to the movie's symbolism. The problem is that we don't know this until we have seen the whole film. Another sequence will suffice to illustrate the interpretive problems the movie presents: a Texas Ranger, the man leading the hunt, is talking on a primitive telephone (the film is set in 1901 in West Texas). The scene goes on and on with the Ranger shouting into the phone and unable to make himself understood. The viewer gets irritated -- what is the point of a scene illustrating the deficiencies of turn-of-the-20th century telephones? But, later, we learn that the whole film turns on a miscommunication -- the old "telephone" game played between languages. With one startling exception, the movie withholds from the viewer the standard pleasures of a Western -- there seem to be too many close-ups and the camera is often placed in a position that is uncommunicative. The gunfights are chaotic affairs with people swinging their guns as they shoot like clubs, seemingly forgetting that the weapon is a firearm, and everyone is killed at close-range in brawls that don't make any sense. The film shows little sense of topography -- although with one great exception. When Cortez is trapped in a box canyon, he simply escapes off-screen -- we don't know how he accomplishes this act: this sort of derring-do is not what interests the film-maker and, so, he blithely avoids staging what would be an exciting sequence in most movies. As a Spanish-speaking peasant, Cortez is invisible unless a posse is chasing him -- he waters his horse at a Hill Country pond while other cowboys simply ignore him. In one surprising scene, Cortez goes into a café and eats lunch while the place is crowded with Texas Rangers who have just been chasing him -- they don't know what he looks like and Mexicans literally "can't be seen" unless they are criminals. There is a annoyingly long sequence in which Cortez eats with a cowhand who has been riding fences for two months. The Anglo cow-hand is desperately lonely and talks to Cortez for what purports to be hours, knowing full well that Cortez has no idea what he is saying -- this is also thematic, although the viewer doesn't know it when the scene actually plays. In the chase scenes, the pursuing posse usually seem so close to Cortez that it is unimaginable that they would not catch him -- the viewer first curses the director ("this man doesn't even know how to stage a horse chase") but, then, grasps, at last, that the horse chases aren't the point of the movie: they are just punctuation. And, as I will note below, when he wants a horse chase to excite the viewer, Young stages one of the greatest episodes of this kind in the history of the Western. The trial scenes are under-dramatized, basically forums for the kind of florid oratory that lawyers favored 120 years ago -- they are realistic but not exciting or suspenseful. Young's point is that Cortez story is instantly converted into something other than the bare facts -- it becomes a springboard for Ciceronian rhetoric in the court room, it sells newspaper as journalism, and, most importantly, it becomes the basis of a border ballad, a corrido that is still sung today and that we see performed in a makeshift theater where Mexicans are raising money for Cortez' defense. Facts are never just the facts -- they are politicized, sensationalized, and, ultimately, turned into mythology.
In the supplemental material on the disc, Edward James Olmos, the Chicano star who was instrumental in getting this picture produced, repeatedly says that the movie is the movie was stated to be "the most authentic historical picture ever produced" by the American Historical Society. But every narrative strategy in the film cuts against this perception -- in fact, the film feels hyper-modern, cubist, a bit like Rossellini's late didactic films or Antonioni's Blow Up. Lens flares are ubiquitous, always reminding the viewer that there is a camera between us and what the film shows. The movie has a complicated structure of flashbacks, sometimes, the same scene shown from two different perspectives, and the narrative is not chronological but choppy with cuts back and forth between different time-frames. The editing is confusing -- this seems to me to be an unintentional defect and, on first watching the film, my main note to myself was that I couldn't understand the obstructive nature of the editing. The soundtrack is Vangelis-style techno-pop that seems jarring, particularly since the movie is ostensibly based on a folk ballad. Camera set-ups are intentionally uncommunicative. Often the film looks ugly -- it was shot on 16 mm in natural light and scenes are either too dark or too bright. (The movie was made for what we would call PBS today, shown 17 times on TV, and, then, basically shelved after it failed with test audiences at the box office; the picture was also financed by Redford's Sundance Institute, one of the first movies to be sponsored by that organization, and, paid for, in part, as well, by La Raza. One of the places where the film was shot was Chama, New Mexico, the site of a Gregorio Cortez-style manhunt that almost erupted into Civil War between the Anglos and the Latinos in the late sixties -- that manhunt also arose from the shooting of a sheriff and his deputy at a courthouse. It's not clear to me what happened when scenes were shot at Chama, only a decade after the big gunfights in that area -- whatever occurred Olmos and the others choose not to talk about this.) A commitment to shooting on actual locations requires the filmmakers to make perverse choices in the jail and trial scenes -- it's too dark in many of these shots and the space makes no sense: there seems to be a gallows in the jail (and there was in fact) but the camera angles don't ever really show you the environment presumably because it was too tight to put a camera anywhere to survey the scene. Most radically, the Spanish in the movie is not translated -- we don't see an interpreter until the film is almost over. Young doesn't give us any subtitles and, so, when the characters speak in Spanish we can only guess what they are saying -- again, this is powerfully thematic since the film's theme is miscommunication across the language barrier. But one can imagine the confusion that the film caused when it was first shown -- it seems that the first and most enthusiastic audiences to embrace the film were bilingual Chicanos who saw the movie in theaters at free screenings hosted by La Raza when the picture was first completed.) In another riff on the theme of miscommunication, Young stages a scene with the victorious Texas Rangers drinking toasts to their capture of Cortez -- he uses Altman style overlapping dialogue, so densely mixed that we can't really hear what any of the men are saying -- it's just a mumble of syllables, a modernist device for making even English, the majority audience's home tongue, seem incomprehensible. Some parts of the movie just don't make sense: we see Cortez gazing down at the Rio Grande and know that he is within a few hundred yards of escaping into Mexico. But in the next scene he is huddled in tiny shack at the bottom of a deep hollow and surrounded by Texas Rangers -- he is captured without a shot being fired, a deliberate and audience-unfriendly anti-climax. (For my taste, Olmos is too pathetic in some scenes -- he has big Bill Keane eyes and looks like a wounded bird and he is always kissing or hugging his horse in an endearing way: these latter gestures, however, are also realistic; everyone agrees that Cortez is a consummate horseman and, in fact, his skill with these animals is what keeps him ahead of the armies of Texas Rangers chasing him.)
In short, the film's apparent deficiencies, except, I think, the bad editing, are all thematic. In one scene, a herd of Texas Rangers chases Cortez to a high ridge. From atop the ridge, Cortez can see a train steaming forward and the entire shimmering plain blocked by skirmish lines of riders charging uphill toward him. Cortez drives his horse down the steep hill, riding right at the approaching horsemen -- then, he turns sharply and rides along the front of their approaching column while the air puffs and smokes with pistol and rifle shots. The men on the train start shooting at Cortez and his galloping horse as well. Cortez outruns the train locomotive in a welter of Soviet-style montage (the horse's legs rhythmically intercut with the train engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive's fiery maw) and, then, crossing the tracks, speeds under a high railroad trestle, galloping through the shadows cast by the engine and its cars as the train crosses the bridge. This is one of the most thrilling and brilliantly choreographed action sequences ever filmed and shows what Young could do if action for action's sake interested him.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Wind River
Wind River (2017) begins strong, a glimpse of people and a place that we might not otherwise know -- the Arapaho on the Wind River reservation, an enclave of poverty and hopelessness occupying one of the most spectacular wilderness areas on earth. The plot is familiar to the point of cliché -- a lonely, divorced game warden discovers a woman's corpse in the remote mountains near Lander. The dead woman, actually an 18 year old girl, was a friend of his daughter who was, herself, murdered a couple of years previously. The game warden (Jeremy Renner) is a man who specializes in using a high-powered rifle to kill "predators" -- literally, in this film, wolves and mountain lions, but, of course, later, human beings who fit that description. Since the killing occurred on Federal land, the Indian Reservation, the FBI is called. The Bureau sends a winsome, naïve young woman to lead the investigation -- Agent Banner played by Elizabeth Olson. Banner forges an unlikely alliance with the embittered and despairing game warden to solve the mystery involving the dead girl and bring the predatory perpetrators to justice. This is all very, very standard stuff but enlivened by the location shooting on the reservation, the Wyoming landscapes, and the periodic snowstorms and blizzards -- it's a very cold movie and the acting is uniformly excellent. (Curiously, the film's premise -- a dead girl found near a small and rural Western community -- is the same as that of Twin Peaks and, in fact, there are resemblances that go beyond the bare premise: there's some suggestion that the bored teenage girls in the remote town are willing to take unreasonable risks with older men.)
But it's ultimately pretty hard to correct for stupid, and, unfortunately, the movie takes a bad turn after about thirty minutes. It turns out that the bad guys are security guards protecting an oil-drilling rig. The oil drilling rig is in the exact middle of nowhere and, so, it's a little puzzling that a half-dozen heavily armed dudes (some of them with machine guns) have to be stationed there in trailer houses to protect the place. (Protect it against whom?) The film devolves into a standard revenge drama involving big, spectacular Tarantino-style stand-offs between the FBI agent, the local Sheriff's department, the Indian police, and the well-armed security guards. These are the kind of shoot-outs in which everyone has to be killed two or three times, at least, for maximum violence -- everyone gets shot repeatedly. In a bizarre turn of events, the hero has decided to not attend the slaughter-fest at the oil rig -- instead, he's opted to track a mountain lioness to her lair. Of course, her lair is located a few thousand feet from the OK corral-style shootout at the oil rig and, so, he can come to the rescue with his hunting rifle and deliver the coup de grace to a couple bad guys who just refuse to stay dead. Poor Agent Banner has been shot at close-range with a shot-gun blast to the chest. As she's bleeding to death, the hero procures her permission to leave her weltering in gore and go off on a solo punitive man-hunt against the worst of the bad guys. Instead of helping the wounded FBI agent, the hero spends his time torturing to death the chief bad guy, a massive undertaking since it involves capturing the guy, mutilating him, and, then, driving by snowmobile up to the snowfields under Gannett Peak, Wyoming's highest mountain for the final torture-murder. (The measure of merit in this idiotic film is one's ability to run barefoot through snow and ice in subzero temperatures -- the chief bad guy fails this test while the poor dead girl whose discovery triggers the film's mystery story ran for "six miles" until her lungs froze and she died of "frozen alveoli." -- I have my doubts about this medical condition which seems to me to be invented for the movie.) Of course, it turns out that the lady FBI agent was wearing a bullet-proof vest and she will pull through. There's some gibberish spoken about grieving and the movie, which has regaled us with a wholly gratuitous and brutal rape scene, ends on a pious note, advising by title that no one keeps track of native women who go missing and that there is an epidemic of their disappearances. The picture is vulgar and nasty -- there's no reason to stage the rape, but, I suppose, we need motivation to cheer on the hero's torture and murder of the bad guy. The hero has taken care to get the FBI agent's consent to this torture-murder and so, I suppose, all is supposed to be well, but, in fact, it's a reprehensible climax to a movie deadened by gross stupidity during its last hour.
Normally, in a film like this, a connection would be forged between the death of the hero's daughter (she was half-Indian and presumably killed by Caucasian bad actors in a place called Pinedale) and the death of the girl that prompts the detective narrative in this film. But no connection is made -- the point being that native women are, I suppose, just randomly killed and no one cares about their slaughter. This meretricious nonsense was financed in part by the Tunica - Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana.
But it's ultimately pretty hard to correct for stupid, and, unfortunately, the movie takes a bad turn after about thirty minutes. It turns out that the bad guys are security guards protecting an oil-drilling rig. The oil drilling rig is in the exact middle of nowhere and, so, it's a little puzzling that a half-dozen heavily armed dudes (some of them with machine guns) have to be stationed there in trailer houses to protect the place. (Protect it against whom?) The film devolves into a standard revenge drama involving big, spectacular Tarantino-style stand-offs between the FBI agent, the local Sheriff's department, the Indian police, and the well-armed security guards. These are the kind of shoot-outs in which everyone has to be killed two or three times, at least, for maximum violence -- everyone gets shot repeatedly. In a bizarre turn of events, the hero has decided to not attend the slaughter-fest at the oil rig -- instead, he's opted to track a mountain lioness to her lair. Of course, her lair is located a few thousand feet from the OK corral-style shootout at the oil rig and, so, he can come to the rescue with his hunting rifle and deliver the coup de grace to a couple bad guys who just refuse to stay dead. Poor Agent Banner has been shot at close-range with a shot-gun blast to the chest. As she's bleeding to death, the hero procures her permission to leave her weltering in gore and go off on a solo punitive man-hunt against the worst of the bad guys. Instead of helping the wounded FBI agent, the hero spends his time torturing to death the chief bad guy, a massive undertaking since it involves capturing the guy, mutilating him, and, then, driving by snowmobile up to the snowfields under Gannett Peak, Wyoming's highest mountain for the final torture-murder. (The measure of merit in this idiotic film is one's ability to run barefoot through snow and ice in subzero temperatures -- the chief bad guy fails this test while the poor dead girl whose discovery triggers the film's mystery story ran for "six miles" until her lungs froze and she died of "frozen alveoli." -- I have my doubts about this medical condition which seems to me to be invented for the movie.) Of course, it turns out that the lady FBI agent was wearing a bullet-proof vest and she will pull through. There's some gibberish spoken about grieving and the movie, which has regaled us with a wholly gratuitous and brutal rape scene, ends on a pious note, advising by title that no one keeps track of native women who go missing and that there is an epidemic of their disappearances. The picture is vulgar and nasty -- there's no reason to stage the rape, but, I suppose, we need motivation to cheer on the hero's torture and murder of the bad guy. The hero has taken care to get the FBI agent's consent to this torture-murder and so, I suppose, all is supposed to be well, but, in fact, it's a reprehensible climax to a movie deadened by gross stupidity during its last hour.
Normally, in a film like this, a connection would be forged between the death of the hero's daughter (she was half-Indian and presumably killed by Caucasian bad actors in a place called Pinedale) and the death of the girl that prompts the detective narrative in this film. But no connection is made -- the point being that native women are, I suppose, just randomly killed and no one cares about their slaughter. This meretricious nonsense was financed in part by the Tunica - Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana.
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